Monday 23 November 2009

NaNoWriMo

Hi again

There has been quite a big gap between my first and second post, for two reasons mainly.

The first is that I wasn't sure if this had been posted out to the ethernet never to be found by anyone else - yes I'm quite a novice with technology in some respects. The response from Jayne - thank you so much Jayne - reassured me that I wasn't talking to myself (as I spend half of my life!) and has spurred me on to post again.

The second is that I have been involved in NaNoWriMo for the first time which has absorbed all my writing time.

We're into the final week of NaNoWriMo and heading towards the 50,000 words target. In the last three weeks I have managed to write 38,000 words of my novel and I am somewhat astounded by this. It took me at least a year to even get this far with my yet unedited first novel and the fact that I have done this is three weeks is little short of a miracle. It just goes to show what you can achieve when you have a deadline.

The prospect of 50,000 words was incredibly daunting at the beginning of November, but I split the word count into 30 days and made sure that I wrote that number of words each day. On some days I try to do more than that so that I have a bit of a buffer, especially for the weekends which are usually even more hectic than the weekdays.

Now don't get me wrong, some of those words (if not most of them) are probably completely rubbish but the fact is that they are there - and can and will be edited. My only problem now is trying to keep up with the plot and as it is an historical novel, research. But I've only got another 12,000 to go and I'm determined to get there by the end of the week.

So thank you NaNoWriMo, you have inspired me and I'll definitely do it again next year.

So Wanna be a Writer

1 comment:

  1. Aw thank you! I think the thing with blogs is deciding what you want to use them for. Mine was mainly to have somewhere to dump thoughts to clear my head as I wrote my book idea – took maybe three weeks until I got my first comment – and I was so excited! A reader! But dumping thoughts is still the main reason, although I do love to know people read/enjoy it as well – and if they leave me a comment I feel like doing the Snoopy Dance of Happiness!

    If you want to attract folk over to your blog, then it mainly is a question of finding other blogs that you are interested in (trying clicking the links on blogs you enjoy – you might like A Cat of Impossible Colour, A Rose Beyond the Thames, or Aspiring Writer on mine), and then linking to them, and commenting on their blogs, and then they might pop over to comment and link back to yours. I hope you stay with it and enjoy it!

    And good luck on the final mad dash of NaNoWriMo! The finishing line is in sight – you’ve done brilliantly so far to write so much in such a short space of time. I don't think I could do it. Go you!

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